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There's this one app I work in that has the annoying feature of activating my Caps Lock key on certain screens. Depending upon how much keyboard work I'm doing, I might not notice until I write one of my associates a text message and find that I'm screaming at them about the time I hit the "Send" key. They are used to the app so they just laugh when they see it. But, in my mind, there is virtually no annoyance too trivial to fix with an overly complex script. Or four of them,

The Windows host file is both a powerful tool and a pain in the posterior. It's powerful because you can do so much with it. Build a poor man's site filter, create shortcuts to local resources, that sort of thing. It's a pain because Windows doesn't want you to edit it. If you've ever done so, then you know the hoops you have to jump through because Windows wants to protect you from dangerous changes to system files. How kind of them.

Sometimes, Windows doesn't want to tell you anything useful. Sometimes, PHP wants to flat lie to you. I ran into a couple roadblocks recently while setting up PHP on a Windows server, and I thought it might be nice of me to share the experience. That way, next time this happens, I only need to read my own blog to see how I handled it last time.

If you haven't used Amazon's Web Services yet, you really should. They are currently hosting more of "the cloud" than their next ten competitors (Google, Microsoft, RackSpace, etc.) combined. And, they do everything in their power to make it easy for you. In addition to tons of pretty good documentation, they also offer a "Free Tier" for you to test the service out to see if it meets your needs. I'm currently running a couple services on mine and, once you get past the initial set-up, it starts to look and act pretty much like the server you have running down the hall.

Calibre (pronounced like the bullet) is one of my all-time favorite applications. It allows me to store, manage, and remotely access all of my ebooks in DRM-free formats, across a number of appliances, and share them with my family as well. It supports dozens of powerful community-written plug-ins, allows batch meta-data editing, has a built-in web-server, and converts books to and from multiple popular formats. But it was written as a single-user desktop application, which comes with certain limitations that are difficult to work around.

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About

I'm Dan Ziemecki, the author of this site and a technology professional working in the Atlanta area. "Excellent Cruft" is a journal wherein I log the lessons of my various projects (before I forget them) in an effort to give back to the community. Feel free to use anything you find here.